Political correctness, mad or otherwise, usually springs from a desire to be polite.Humans have always used euphemisms and taboos to oil the wheels of social intercourse; without them, we would be forever trampling on each other's sore spots.It is a curious fact that the same people who rail against political correctness often pride themselves on their gentility in other respects. Most of the time we rubbed along fine; I do believe we quite liked each other. But if I ever queried a piece of his work he would retaliate by calling me darling. "No, darling," he would sigh, his tone both sympathetic and weary, as though he were addressing a backward child. "You just don't get it, do you?" It was untrue, unfair - and above all, unchivalrous. This is something that the good burghers of Hull would do well to remember.
I once had a colleague - no, dammit, an employee - who, as a much older and mildly chauvinist man, disliked the fact that I was his boss. It means never burping, snorting with laughter or buying a round.It is no accident that ladies crop up a great deal in modern comedy, from the mincing transvestite in Little Britain, with his trademark squawk of "I'm a laydee", to the Pub Landlord who insists on serving only "white wine or a fruit-based drink to the ladies", regardless of what they might actually desire. In both cases, the joke relies on an understanding that only someone with an absurdly narrow view of womankind would reduce us all to ladies.Likewise, terms of endearment such as pet and darling can - in the wrong hands - be powerfully annoying. Lady, on the other hand, is saturated with daintiness: it suggests coy glances and batting eyelashes, pencil skirts, pinnies, manicures, tiny feet, dinner on the table and not a hair out of place. Woman is a straightforward word, a description of gender only lightly dusted with overtones of maturity and earthiness. Thus, while one lot considers "lady" to be a respectful and genteel form of address, the other regards it as pretentious and inaccurate.
A lady, as my grandmother drummed into me from childhood, is a woman with a title. Anyone else who calls herself a lady is a social climber.Feminists, too, dislike the connotations of "lady" - though for rather better reasons. According to the Liberal Democrat councillor Carl Minns, this is - brace yourself - "political correctness gone mad. I was brought up to refer to them as ladies - that is good manners - but will this now be a disciplinary matter?" Councillor Minns's confusion is, perhaps, a problem of class as well as gender. Those words that the lower middle classes tend to think are polite - toilet, pardon, serviette - are often reviled by the upper middle classes, and vice versa.